* Norman Walsh <Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM> [2005-11-28 12:21-0500]
> / Ben Adida <ben@mit.edu> was heard to say:
> |> | Do I really need to write the Dublin Core URI multiple times?
> |>
> |> That would work.
> |
> | Yes, it would "work," but it would violate one of our strong
> | requirements that we help users not duplicate data unnecessarily. If
> | a user wants to upgrade from one version of Dublin Core to the next,
> | he shouldn't have to go change all the Dublin Core properties used
> | throughout every document.
>
> Interesting. I'm used to the argument that URIs are bad because
> they're long and hard to type. Your argument above is for a level of
> indirection, is that right?
A layer of indirection that would have been useless in the case
of Dublin Core btw. DC changed from using
http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.0/ to
http://pur.org/dc/elements/1.1/
...but also changed the case of the properties, from 'Creator' to
'creator'.
I don't know of another popular RDF namespace where, in practice,
there are a large number of documents that could be upgraded with
only a change to the URI part of a property name. Not DC, nor RSS1,
nor FOAF, ... In general I discourage people from moving to a new
namespace URI unless the vocab has changed significantly --- and that
can often include property names. If the change is minor enough that
it can be handled with a "search and replace", then why bother change
the namespace URI in the first place?
Dan